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Tijuana construction worker Luis Espinoza can sympathize with every Chargers and Padres fan in San Diego.

He’s been waiting for the same championship as you. He’s been waiting for as long as he can remember, for 40 of the 44 years he’s been on the planet.

And if the stars align tonight, our region’s elusive major professional sports championship will no longer be mythical. It will finally arrive — in the hands of a nascent soccer team named after a hairless Mexican dog.

Say it together, loud and proud: Club Tijuana Xoloitzcuintles de Caliente.

Cat got your tongue? Try yelling Xolos (pronounced show-lows) instead. Still having trouble? Then just listen Sunday around sunset: The chants of 1.75 million people in Tijuana should carry well across the border.

The binational fans of this team aren’t shy about their fanaticism; they wear more red and black than you’ll ever find at an Aztecs game, and they let the opposing goalie know in unapologetically uncouth terms.

The sudden success of this six year-old squad (promoted to Mexico’s top division two years ago) is helping to rebrand Tijuana on both sides of the border, and fans are growing by the minute and the “Win it!”

It’s been electrifying, as the best runs of sports teams are. Tijuana, a city long known for tequila shooters, zonkeys and drug wars, is now widely regarded for so much more: its food scene, its art and its fútbol.

“I don’t like soccer, man,” Espinoza was saying Thursday in a dirt lot outside Estadio Caliente a few hours before the local team defeated Toluca 2-1 to gain an edge going into Sunday’s decisive rematch for the championship.

“Es Super Bowl Mexicano, papa!” Espinoza barked at me before asking: “If you have the ticket to the Super Bowl, do you say, ‘I don’t go’?”

Knowing that even more electric seasons will follow, a better question for San Diego would be, “Do you go to a Xolos game at all? Any game?”

Too many of us, I fear, would answer “no” while fretting about violence or a long border wait or an even more unmanageable barrier: language.

To them, with apologies to the great announcer Andrés Cantor, I say, “Gooooooooooooooooooooo!”

Thursday’s game was my second and nothing like the first, a 2-0 win in August. Both times, I went down with my friend Hiram Soto, who bought season tickets two years ago with the team’s ascent to a better league.

A San Diegan who lived in Tijuana until he was 20, Soto still recalls visiting his grandmother’s apartment as a kid to find the city’s best soccer players surrounding her TV because they didn’t have their own.

Those teams — and their fans — were a long way from Mexico’s top league.

“You grew up wanting to go to a soccer game and being that kid who goes to the stadium with his dad and goes in and watches the game and has the T-shirt and has the posters on the walls,” Soto said. “I always wanted to be that kid and never was. I’m living my childhood dream at 37.”

The city’s soccer players are, too. A few weeks ago, a handful who were signing autographs at a new Xolos store at the Plaza Bonita mall in National City unexpectedly found themselves facing hundreds of fans.

Theirs is the hottest ticket in town, any town, right now. Wednesday, tickets that people had just purchased for 500 pesos (about $40) were being resold at three times the price. That’s a lot of money in Mexico, but this was the finals — one last home game for players who could run circles around the San Diego Sockers and for exuberant fans led by an animated group called “La Masakr3” that puts SDSU’s “The Show” to shame.

Roberto Cornejo, who went to Francis Parker School in San Diego, was so fanatical about the team that he quit California Western School of Law after a year to become the Xolos’ assistant general manager in 2009.

Now, the team packs its 20,000-seat stadium and is planning an expansion to accommodate up to 33,000 people. The Padres rarely draw that.

“You can ask anyone that’s been to a Chargers game or a Padres game,” Cornejo said. “The amount of people that come from T.J. up to those games is a healthy amount of the fan base. Now it’s the other way around.”

The estimate is that several thousand Americans go to any given game. Aware of that, the team has an English-language website and expects to add a virtual store soon because it fields emails from as far away as Washington, Texas and Florida asking how fans can buy jerseys online.

“We have a championship caliber team,” spokesman Ivan Orozco said. “You want to put it in perspective for your readers? Think football in Green Bay.”

Pay $25 to park at a Chargers game? Or pay $25 to trolley and cab it to and from a Xolos game and buy four beers inside?